About This Book
Instructor’s Corner
Introduction to Vacuum Technology Instructor’s Guide and Student Manual are designed to accompany the Introduction to Vacuum Technology e-book. This Instructor’s Guide is an expanded version of the Student Laboratory Manual with the following additional resources available to instructors and presented in the “Instructor’s Corner” similar to this one:
- Bill of materials for the rough vacuum equipment trainer,
- Clarification of the experiments’ design and implementation,
- Additional background information to supplement the laboratory instruction,
- Typical student misconceptions to address,
- Required time in class,
- Relationship of each learning activity to other materials,
- Preparation required before conducting each learning activity,
- Sample answers and solutions for the pre-lab assignments,
- Videos demonstrating equipment setup and operational procedures which can also be used in class as demonstrations,
- Videos demonstrating select individual learning activities which can also be used for data-taking if the rough vacuum equipment trainer is not available,
- Sample results, and
- Sample answer, solutions, and/or graphs for the analysis section of each learning activity.
The following introduction is presented in the Students’ Laboratory Manual:
Vacuum systems are critical to many industries and technicians with the knowledge and skills to maintain, troubleshoot, and repair vacuum systems are essential in manufacturing and research settings. This Laboratory Manual contains a sequence of hands-on, experiential-learning activities that will help you develop the knowledge and skills needed to be a vacuum equipment technician. These activities can be performed using a simple Rough Vacuum Equipment Training (RVET) System.
The sequence of learning activities is designed and organized to be used with the e-book entitled Introduction to Vacuum Technology-E-book by David Hata, Elena Brewer, and Nancy Louwagie. The first set of learning activities focuses on fundamental gas laws. These activities are followed by learning activities that focus on using the RVET system to practice system operation, system characterization, and system diagnosis and troubleshooting. This lab manual is the result of years of teaching vacuum technology at the community college level and have been classroom-tested at Normandale Community College and Erie Community College. Many thanks go to our former students for challenging the authors to learn more about vacuum science, the variety of system designs, and how these systems work and don’t work, at times. We hope that you will experience the same joy of discovery as you develop your knowledge and skills needed by vacuum technicians.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 2000454. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this e-book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
